North Korea, Russia evade U.N. sanctions to buttress Moscow’s drone

FORUM Staff

North Korea has sent workers to Russia to manufacture military drones, violating United Nations Security Council resolutions, an international monitoring team reported, noting the number of North Koreans working in Russia has sharply increased since Moscow’s war with Ukraine began in 2022.

Overall, an estimated 100,000 North Korean laborers are deployed overseas, mostly to China and Russia, the Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team (MSMT) reported.

“At least 17 countries are suspected of continuing to host labourers, generating between $450 million and $800 million in 2025 to fund [North Korea’s] unlawful nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs,” the September 2026 report said.

An estimated 15,000 to 30,000 North Koreans work in Russia, including a contingent deployed in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone facilities assembling uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) for Russian armed forces to use against Ukraine, the report said.

Since late 2021, the UAV factory and associated facilities in the zone have expanded from two buildings to a 17-facility complex of up to 116 buildings, producing more than 5,500 drones monthly for the war in Ukraine, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a United States-based think tank, reported.

The number of imported workers began increasing in 2020, when Russia allowed student visa-holders to work, creating a scheme to camouflage North Korean laborers as students. The deployments violate a U.N. Security Council resolution requiring U.N. members to repatriate income-earning North Korean nationals by the end of 2019.

North Korea and Russia “have built an extensive ecosystem of state-led sanctions evasion,” the report said. Russia issued more than 36,000 visas to North Koreans in 2025, four times the 2024 total, The Wall Street Journal newspaper reported.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, who has supplied missiles and armed forces to Moscow to fight Ukraine, exports workers to fund his illegal weapons programs and reinforce his alliance with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Kim’s actions illustrate his willingness to expose North Korea’s people to danger to serve his objectives, analysts say.

“Kim’s major concern isn’t North Korean workers getting killed,” Peter Ward, a research fellow at the Sejong Institute, a think tank in the Republic of Korea (ROK), told the newspaper. “His motivations are financial.”

Each North Korean laborer in Russia generates $7,500 in average annual wages, the MSMT estimated, but the North Korean regime confiscates up to 90% of those earnings. In some cases, the amount exceeds earnings, leaving workers indebted to Pyongyang.

“The regime is selling the labor of its citizens under a state-to-state arrangement, controlling whether they may leave and collecting most of their wages,” Victor Cha, president of the Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department and Korea chair at the CSIS, told U.S. lawmakers in September 2026.

An estimated 20,000 to 70,000 North Korean laborers are deployed in China. Despite a temporary repatriation of as many as 20,000 workers from 2023-25, about 10,000 new North Korean workers arrived in China between January 2025 and January 2026, the MSMT report found.

The MSMT comprises Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the ROK, the United Kingdom and the U.S. It launched in October 2024 to monitor U.N. sanctions against North Korea after Russia and China scrapped a previous Security Council enforcement tool. Russia vetoed and China abstained from renewing the prior U.N. panel that had enforced sanctions over North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs for 15 years.